Breadcrumb

Celebrating Bloomington's Bicentennial 1818 - 2018

Our Bicentennial is a milestone worth celebrating. An exciting 2018 in Bloomington and Monroe County will include meaningful, moving and educational events for residents of all ages. It’s more than just a 200th birthday. We commemorate and honor the generations of people -- their hard work, generous spirit, and difficult choices -- that made this place what it is today. That helped make us who we are today. Our predecessors gave us a beautiful and valuable physical environment: bricks and mortar, parks and trees, pipes and reservoirs, streets and sidewalks, and streetscapes and vistas. They bequeathed to us as well the spirit and heart of our community -- our culture, our diversity, our creativity, and inclusiveness.

Our jewel of a city sparkles with an energy and shine that reflects 200 years of grit and ingenuity, creating this “Blooming Town” out of a wilderness, surviving civil war, social fractures, economic depressions, and a thousand forks in the road that cumulatively add up to today. As we celebrate, let’s resolve to take the best of the past 200 years and use those lessons and inspiration to drive our choices and actions today. With this Bicentennial let’s rededicate ourselves to those values of fairness, charity, kindness, ingenuity, innovation, education and good old-fashioned hard work that brought us here. As we pass the torch to the following generations, let’s do our part to pass along a healthy, humane and thriving community, so the next milestones will inspire celebrations as well.